Albert Vincent
Carone is one of those people who spent his life dancing between
raindrops and turning invisible wherever a shadow lingered. He
existed and also didn't exist. Al Carone--unlike his near namesake,
Al Capone--truly was a paradox wrapped in a mystery concealed behind
an enigma.

Carone was a detective in the New York Police
Department, but this didn't stop him from becoming a "made" man in
the Genovese crime family. He knew all the leading Mafiosi of his
day, including Vito Genovese, Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante, Joe
Colombo and Pauley Castellano amongst others. To Carone's daughter,
Dee, they were all known as "Uncle". When she got married, her father
arranged two different reception rooms to separate the Mob guests
from the NYPD guests. But this was more window-dressing than anything
else. One of Carone's principal functions in the NYPD was to act as
the "bagman" in protecting shipments of CIA drugs to the various
Mafia families.

Carone died in 1990 under mysterious
circumstances. This followed a period of great personal
disenchantment with his life, following a secretive mission to Mexico
in 1985 when a large number of innocent women and children died
unnecessarily. His death was horrific, reports Mike Ruppert, editor
of From
The Wilderness newsletter, who has
investigated Carone's life story and written a special report on it
(see acknowledgements).

Meanwhile, another "Uncle" was Bill Casey,
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Reagan
Administration. Casey had been with the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) during World War II. During the 1970s, he became Chairman of
the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which regulates the US
investment industry. During his tenure in that role, Casey used
Carone as a "cut out" to pass sensitive insider information to Mob
capo Pauley Castellano, says his daughter, Dee.

Carone was also a Full Colonel in the US Army,
where he had operated in the Army's Counter Intelligence Corp (CIC).
Unsurprisingly, in view of his close friendship with Bill Casey, he
was also a covert operative for the CIA. But that wasn't half of it.
Carone was also a Grand Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of
Malta (SMOM), which historically has been the military arm of the
Vatican and is regarded as a separate State with full powers of
statehood, including issuing its own diplomatic passports.

In more recent decades SMOM has acted as a funding
conduit, a black market gold channel and money laundry for the CIA,
amongst others, and is known to act as the Vatican's intelligence
arm. It was alleged to be involved in, for example, the disappearance
of Russia's gold reserves--over 2,000 metric tonnes--which vanished
during 1991, around the time that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev
was ousted from office.

Malta knighthoods are awarded to many leading
individuals who are part of the military and intelligence community.
The CIA's Bill Casey, for example, was a Knight of Malta. Former NATO
General and later US Secretary of State Alexander Haig is also a
Malta Knight. Another is General Vernon Walters, the former Deputy
Director of the CIA under DCI George Bush, and later appointed a
roving ambassador during the Reagan Administration. The legendary
head of the OSS (the WWII precursor of the CIA), "Wild" Bill Donovan,
was made a Knight along with his wartime compatriot and later CIA
Chief of Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. And John McCone,
another prominent member of the US "spook" agency, was also
distinguished with a Malta knighthood. The list goes on. Most
interesting is Reinhard Gehlen, the former Nazi intelligence expert
recruited by the US in 1945&endash;46 to head the Gehlen Org--a
secret, German-based intelligence arm of the United States that was
composed of former SS and Gestapo agents, many of whom, including
Klaus Barbie, were wanted Nazi war criminals. The foregoing names
amount to a listing of some of the most powerful and influential
members of the Western intelligence community over the last five
decades.

One Vatican group that has extremely close ties to
the Knights of Malta is the ultra-right-wing Opus Dei. This is an
immensely powerful faction in the Vatican today, and its public "do
good" activities eclipse a plethora of the darkest political and
financial machinations known to man. It will not come as a surprise,
perhaps, that Carone was closely associated with Opus Dei and, in
particular, with a covert operation that had its origin back in 1944.
This was Operation Amadeus.

FROM RATLINES TO DRUG SMUGGLING
ROUTES

This highly secretive operation was part of the
Operation Sunrise negotiations conducted between Allen Dulles--the then
senior wartime OSS officer in Switzerland, but later to become the
Director of the CIA--and SS General Karl Wolff. This debonair and
well-connected SS officer commanded the SS and Gestapo contingents in
Italy at the time.

The result of these negotiations (at least those
parts that are now known about) was an agreement affording amnesty to
an extensive roster of SS&endash;Gestapo forces, in exchange for
their agreement to shift their allegiance to the West in the
pre-planned, covert battle aimed at defeating the Soviet communist
"menace"--in other words, the "Cold War".

One spin-off of these Dulles&endash;Wolff
arrangements were the Vatican-run "ratlines" that aided wanted Nazi
war criminals to slink to safety. Tens of thousands of SS and other
Nazis escaped capture as a result of the ratlines. These included
such figures as Franz Stangl, commandant at Treblinka extermination
camp, and his friend Gustav Wagner, who ran the Sobibor death camp.
Others to escape in this manner included Adolf Eichmann, the
architect of the Holocaust. Eichmann was later captured by Israeli
intelligence agents, smuggled to Tel Aviv where he stood trial and
was eventually executed. In comparison, Dr Joseph Mengele--known as
"the White Angel", a war criminal wanted for his cruel and inhuman
experiments on death camp inmates at Auschwitz--escaped to Argentina
and lived a long life.

Operation Amadeus was exclusively
concerned with the flight of SS and Nazi war criminals to the South
American continent and their later ferocious covert actions against
the indigenous populations justified under the banner of
"anti-communism". One individual engaged in Amadeus activities was
former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, known to the world as "the
Butcher of Lyon".

The principal means of funding Operation
Amadeus
activities was the hugely profitable narcotics business. Large stocks
of SS morphia had been smuggled out of Europe and into "Catholic"
South America at the end of the War in accordance with the
Sunrise
agreement. The morphia was accompanied by looted SS gold and large
quantities of counterfeit British banknotes, forged in concentration
camps by captive but skilled counterfeiters as part of an SS scheme
known as Operation Bernhardt.

The escape "lines" used to move wanted men around
South America, away from the prying eyes of Israeli agents, also
proved ideal as smuggling routes for drugs. Decades later, the stocks
of heroin smuggled into the United States for distribution by the
CIA-protected Mafia would be complemented with locally grown
cocaine.

One of the figures to emerge into the spotlight
during the 1980s who was deeply involved in this narcotics traffic
was Colonel Oliver North, who authorised the exchange of guns for
drugs to finance Contra operations. Oliver North was known to Al
Carone under his "work" name, "John Caffrey". This was the time when
Carone was engaged in CIA-controlled cocaine transactions with Joe
"Pickles" Percilia, a member of the Colombo crime family.

These curious and usually concealed connections
between governments (in the form of the military and intelligence
community), organised crime, the Vatican and Nazi war criminals have
some significant history. Not least was the secret agreement reached
between US Naval Intelligence officers and Mafia don Charles "Lucky"
Luciano during World War II. This resulted in the Mafia's decision to
aid and assist the Allies by contacting Mob figure Vito Genovese in
1943 to prepare the way for the Allied landing in Sicily. As earlier
outlined, it was primarily those SS&endash;Gestapo units located in
Italy under command of SS General Wolff that were initially concerned
in the Operation Sunrise negotiations.

And while large numbers of former Nazis were
fleeing south to fight the communist menace in Latin America--and,
more importantly, to profit personally from their involvement in the
lucrative drug and gun business--in Europe, the spadework was being
laid to overthrow or thwart democratically elected governments via a
network of fascist-manned "Stay Behind units", organised under the
aegis of Operation Gladio. Not surprisingly, this would also lead to certain
involved figures making personal fortunes out of other people's
misery--a circumstance that is so commonplace it is barely worth
mentioning.

These neo-fascist activities would come to
prominence in the early 1980s following the collapse of Banco
Ambrosiano and the death of Italian banker Roberto Calvi, who was
"suicided" and left hanging under London's Blackfriars Bridge. This
would lead to sensational disclosures about the role of the Vatican
Bank, the IOR, in Calvi's financial empire and would quickly grow to
include the activities of Mafia financier Michele Sindona--whose
activities, in turn, would implicate leading blue-blood banks in
Europe and America in Mafia activities. Both Sindona and Calvi were
close to Opus Dei, which lost around $55 million when Sindona's
empire crashed. According to his family, Roberto Calvi was deeply
engrossed in helping Opus Dei take control of the IOR when he was
killed.

Meanwhile, both Calvi and Sindona were members of
the secretive Propaganda
Due (P2) masonic lodge, which is said to
have been a "parallel government" in waiting and which planned to
effect a coup d'état in Italy following a Communist Party victory at the
polls.

P2 was run by former Italian fascist and member of
the Nazi SS, Licio Gelli--dubbed "the Puppet Master" by the Italian
press. Gelli's connections to the ultra-hard-right and fascists in
Europe and Latin America were extensive. In fact, he had been deeply
involved in establishing the Vatican-run ratlines that aided the
worst Nazi war
criminals to escape Allied justice at the end of WWII. All told, an
estimated 50,000 Nazis were helped to freedom.

Gelli had numerous powerful friends, including
former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He was also a personal
friend of Argentina's General Juan Perón, and his close
associations with Argentina would later lead him to be a key figure
in shipping a supply of French Exocet missiles to sink British
Task Force ships during the Falklands War. In this endeavour he
worked closely with Ronald R. Rewald, founder of the Hawaiian-based
financial institution Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham &
Wong--a CIA proprietary company and forerunner of the CIA-owned Nugan
Hand Bank.

The involvement of a CIA front company engaged in
financing and providing weapons to be used against a key American
ally (Britain) with the wholehearted public support of the US
Government may seem somewhat duplicitous. However, in the world of
"black ops", "friends" and "enemies" are interchangeable words and
working both sides of the fence is accepted practice.

In terms of hierarchy, Gelli reported to Umberto
Ortolani, described by one writer as "the great Vatican door-opener"
and "secret chamberlain of the papal household". In addition to his
P2 connections, Ortolani is also a member of the inner council of the
Knights of Malta and has military intelligence connections that date
back to WWII.

THE OCTOPUS AND THE SPIDER

There are numerous other masonic groups and secret
societies in Europe which move in and out of focus at various times.
Almost all of them are Catholic in nature.

One of these is the Priory of Sion (Prieuré
de Sion)--a secretive order that first came to public attention via
the best-selling book, The Holy Blood And
The Holy Grail, published in 1982. The
Priory is closely connected with the alleged treasure of Solomon
which is said to have found its way to the small village of
Rennes-le-Château in southwestern France, where it is said to
have been buried by the Knights Templars, forerunners of the Knights
of Malta.

The Priory, whose headquarters were located at
Annemasse, near Geneva on the Swiss border, are styled as the
"guardians" of Solomon's treasure, but, most interestingly, they have
numerous subterranean connections to fascists and those on the far
right that date back to WWII. Meanwhile, it has to be noted in
passing that Annemasse is said to have been the centre for the
anti-communist Stay Behind units of Operation Gladio.

If this is not intriguing enough, another fact
stretches coincidence to the point of bursting. In recent years, the
Priory of Sion has moved its headquarters to Barcelona and now boasts
a Spanish Grand Master. This, one could conclude, is to enable it to
be physically closer to the historical heartland of Opus Dei, which
was founded in Spain in 1928.

If Otto Skorzeny was a leading force in running
the SS Brotherhood escape routes--Der
Spinne, the Spider--after the war, and SS
General Karl Wolff was the lead negotiator with OSS Swiss Chief,
Allen Dulles, then another Nazi, Walter Rauff, head of the Milan SD,
was one of two liaisons with the Vatican involved in the
establishment of the Nazi-smuggling system. Earlier in his career,
Rauff had overseen the development of the Nazis' mobile gas vans,
known as "Black Ravens", which gassed to death around 100,000 Jews,
mostly women and children, by pumping exhaust fumes into the back of
an hermetically sealed van.

Another important link between the Vatican and SS
escape routes was Friedrich Schwendt, who was also the man in charge
of laundering forged SS banknotes. Before WWII, Schwendt was an
international arms dealer who shipped weapons to China and Russia. He
was also the investment manager of the family fortune of his first
wife's aunt, Baroness Gemmingen-Guttenberg, of the vastly wealthy
Argentina-based Bunge family, of the massive transnational firm Bunge
Corporation that is also known as "the Octopus".

This title is interesting, for it may connect to
the so-called "Octopus" that ties in to murdered freelance journalist
Danny Casolaro, who at the time of his death in 1991 was
investigating a number of high-level illegalities including the theft
by the Department of Justice of a "tracking" computer program known
as "PROMIS". Casolaro was writing a book about what he had
discovered. He originally titled it "Behold, A Pale Horse", but later
modified it to "The Octopus". In a draft page of the book, he
described this group as an "international cabal whose freelance
services covered parochial political intrigue, espionage,
sophisticated weapon technologies that included biotoxins, drug
trafficking, money laundering and murder-for-hire". Casolaro further
stated that this cabal was "spawned thirty years ago in the shadow of
the Cold War".

After Casolaro's death, journalist Carol Marshall
(a pen name) followed up his investigation and wrote an (as yet)
unpublished manuscript, titled "The Last Circle". In this, Marshall
describes her investigation of Robert Booth Nichols--one of the
central figures of the Octopus, whom she describes as being part of a
secretive group known as "the Chosen Ones" and who wore "skull and
crossbones rings and shared a common interest, if you could call it
that, in the old German SS occultism, its tribal and inner circle
rites".

During her continuing investigation into the
Octopus, Marshall found that the SS occultism outlined above was
connected to Lt. Col. Michael A. Aquino, a former US Green Beret who
is a self-professed Satanist and who held a Top Secret security
clearance for his work in military intelligence and on classified
psychological warfare matters. Aquino officiated at SS black-magic
ceremonies held at Wewelsburg, the castle once used by SS chief
Heinrich Himmler to create an SS order of Teutonic knights based on
the Knights Templars.

The foregoing connections lend themselves to a
larger picture of global, interlocking, right-wing fascist groupings
that operate in the shadowland of deniable military and intelligence
operations associated with profit during WWII and, later, throughout
the Cold War.

In this respect, it is intriguing to note that the
Priory of Sion, one of the foremost Catholic groups under discussion,
uses as a symbol something that is variously described as an octopus
or a spider (araignée) on its
documents. The Priory's association with the octopus could easily
relate to the so-called Octopus described above, where organised
crime works hand in glove with operatives from US intelligence and
the military. If one decides, on the other hand, that the Priory
symbol is a spider, there is the intriguing notion of the Vatican-run
Nazi escape lines of Austrian Catholic Otto Skorzeny and his SS
Brotherhood's Der Spinne (the Spider).

THE BUSINESS OF GOD

Al Carone was, as mentioned earlier, a "made" man
of the Genovese Mob in addition to his other associations. It is
curious, therefore, to note that one of the leading lights of the
Octopus, according to writer Carol Marshall, was ultra-right-wing oil
tycoon Clint Murchison, owner of the Dallas Cowboys football team.
Murchison's oil company, Murchison Oil Lease Company, was 20 per cent
owned by Gerardo Catena, the chief lieutenant of the Genovese crime
family.

Throughout the Second World War and thereafter
there was, according to author Charles Higham in his book,
Trading With The Enemy, a "general agreement of certain major figures of
American, British and German commerce to continue their relations and
associations after Pearl Harbor". Higham adds that he also learned
that "certain figures of the warring governments had arranged to
assist in this [activity]". Higham's subsequent research proved that
this high cabal--which he dubbed "the Fraternity"--not only existed
but benefited handsomely throughout WWII. This led the author to
ask:

What would have happened if millions of
Americans and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at
the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey
managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and
that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had
discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl
Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the
enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan? Or
that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in
France with authorisation from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel
Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone
conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the
war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the
robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the Focke-Wulfs
that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial
ball-bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin
America with the collusion of the Vice-Chairman of the US War
Production Board, in partnership with Göring's cousin in
Philadelphia, when American forces were desperately short of them? Or
that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either
sanctioned or deliberately ignored?

Higham's "Fraternity" has similar characteristics
to the so-called "Octopus", and also shows certain similarities to
Colonel Oliver North's "Enterprise". All have engaged in the most
dubious and illegal activities for profit, and all operate hand in
glove with organised crime. All lean so far to the right,
ideologically speaking, that the word "fascist" can be used without
reservation. Meanwhile, none of them cares very much for the woes of
humanity and, indeed, they appear committed to stomping on ethics and
moral values wherever they meet them.

The octopus--or "Oct Opus", as one European
documentary film producer renders the spelling when referring to Opus
Dei (which began life on 2 October 1928)--has eight arms that
surround its mouth (ensuring a constant supply of food) and three
hearts, and is therefore not prone to starving or dying. But it can
also be identified by these oddities. Opus Dei, the group that is now
in control of the Vatican, is undoubtedly one arm of this global
criminal network, in this writer's view. Or are the three hearts of
the octopus more vital to identify? Could they be analogous to the
"Church, State and Mafia, the forces that prevail beneath the play of
the shadows of the world" (as described by Nick Tosches in his book,
Power On Earth,
which tells the life story of murdered Mafia financier Michele
Sindona)?

There is yet another interesting twist to this
accumulation of associations: Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands. The
Prince was the founding chairman of the publicity-shy Western power
elite, the Bilderbergers. This shadowy and secretive group meets over
a weekend in May/June each year, under an almost total media blackout
[see deBriefings this issue]. Powerful and very influential figures
from the world of banking, business, politics, the media, trades
unions and academia are invited. Included regularly, for example, are
Dr Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and Italy's "king-maker",
Gianni Agnelli. The first meeting took place in May 1954.

This, strangely, was the same year that Prince
Bernhard became head of the Johanitter Orde
in Nederland, one of four orders that make
up the Chivalric Alliance of Orders of Saint John (Alliance de Chevalerie des Hospitaliers de Saint Jean de
Jérusalem). The stated purpose of
these four, known as "the Alliance"--which is composed of northern
European nations Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and Great Britain,
the latter being an ancient order known as "the Most Venerable
Order"--is "to reduce to silence the enemies of Christ". The
headquarters of the Alliance are located in Switzerland.

These are Protestant orders rather than Catholic,
but it is of significance that, on 26 November 1963, the Alliance was
"consolidated with the signing of a joint declaration between the
Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the Most Venerable Order, at St
John's Gate, London, by the Grand Chancellor of the SMOM, the Prince
of Resuttano, and Lord Wakehurst, Lord Prior of the Most Venerable
Order". In other words, the Catholic and Protestant orders bound
themselves to work together to "silence the enemies of Christ"--a
clear reference to communism.

Interestingly, it has been suggested that the
Knights Templars were "infected" with the Johannite or Mandaean
heresy that denounced Jesus as a "false prophet" and in his place
recognised John the Baptist as the true Messiah. Meanwhile, two early
Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion are said to have had Johannite
tendencies: Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton. Notwithstanding
that, the famous founder of the Knights Templars, Hughes de Payens,
has been accused by the Vatican of being a Johannite.

Leaving aside this brief foray into esoteric
history, it is as well to note that Prince Bernhard, in addition to
his Bilderberg role and as head of the Dutch Johannite Order, was
also an honorary member of Himmler's SS and worked in NW7, the global
intelligence arm of I.G. Farben which acted in the interests of the
Nazi cause. The activities of NW7 in Latin America before, during and
after World War II are deeply interwoven in this story.

In facilitating and aligning itself with many of
the foregoing activities, the Vatican aimed to help eradicate a
communist ideology that despised Christianity. Opus Dei and a host of
other Catholic-cum-fascist secret groups engaged in a litany of
murder, money laundering, drug peddling, arms trafficking,
concealment of WWII loot, embezzlement, manipulation of financial
markets and many other consummate illegalities. The purpose of all
these activities was, arguably, to allow the Vatican to remain the
spiritual bulwark of the Christian West.

But if such business is the business of a Church
preaching of a God in Heaven, then Caesar on Earth had better watch
out. A new landlord has fallen into town.

AcknowledgementsIn preparing this essay, I drew upon an
indispensable group of published/unpublished work and sources, as
follows:

¥ The full account of the unique story of Al
Carone, by Mike Ruppert (available to order online at www.copvcia.com).
¥ Trading With The Enemy, by Charles Higham (St Edmundsbury Press, Suffolk, UK,
1983).
¥ Their Kingdom Come, by Robert Hutchison (St Martin's Press, New York,
1997).
¥ Web of Gold,
by Guy Patton and Robin Mackness (Sidgwick & Jackson, London,
2000).
¥ Ratlines, by
Mark Aarons and John Loftus (Mandarin, London, 1991).
¥ The Bormann Brotherhood, by William Stevenson (Arthur Baker, London, 1973).
¥ Unpublished manuscript by Peter Dale Scott on Barbie, Dulles and
Operation Sunrise. It details how the OSS&endash;SS preserved each other
while serving their true masters: transnational corporations.
¥ The Last Circle, an unpublished manuscript by Carol Marshall, which
investigates the so-called "Octopus".
¥ My thanks also go to Catherine Austin Fitts (www.solari.com) for her invaluable help.
-- David G. Guyatt

About the Author:Following a 28-year career as a
professional international banker based in the City of London,
David
Guyatt now pursues a career researching,
writing and producing material for TV documentaries, films and
magazines. His feature articles have appeared in diverse publications
including BusinessAge, NEXUS, ForteanTimes, The X Factor and Lobster.
In addition to his commercial writing, David has prepared background
papers on anti-personnel electromagnetic weapons for the
International Committee on the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as for
Scientists for Global Responsibility. He has also written for the
World Development Movement on his "insider" knowledge of
international weapons financing.
David was engaged as an expert consultant for the two-part
World in Action
TV documentary, broadcast in the UK in April 1997, that exposed
Britain's weapons trail to Indonesia; and he assisted Swiss TV in a
documentary on non-lethal weapons, also broadcast in early 1997. At
present, he is pursuing an in-depth investigation into the real
secrets surrounding the enigma of Nazi gold and WWII treasure looted
by both German and Japanese "plunder teams". It will also unravel
some of the more enduring secrets of the gold market.

UFO's The Beginning of a New World. This site deals with the many different aspects of UFO's, with the latest UFO sightings from around the world. Plus there are articles on Crop Circles and theories about what causes these formations. There are many articles about UFO Abductions, and UFO Abduction stories, plus items covering Cattle Mutilations, Earth Changes, and prophecy of the rise in these types of events, such as earthquakes from around the world. You will also find the work of Sir Laurence Gardner covered in this site which focues on the Holy Grail, Bloodline of the Holy Grail, Genesis of the Grail King, Lord of the Rings and many other Religious interpretations of the Bible itself, plus the life and work of Jesus Christ and how much of a role Mary Magdalene played. Laurence Gardners work also deals with such topics are The Knights Templar, White Powder Gold and it's healing properties.
Also covered on this site are sections on Mind Control, Military and Government plus historical Conspiracy, reports of Alien Implants, Remote Viewing, work by Richard Hoagland and the Face On Mars. New Age Predictions, information on the infamous Rennes-le-Chateau Mysteries, News Coverups. Ancient Egypt and it's history, plus research papers on our own Human Origins. Much to read here!

If you have a personal site and wish to have some graphics, please visit my Kiwis Graphics site which has 100's of free designer sets for you to use. Or if you site is business, I have some stunning templates available there also!.
Karen Lyster, UFO Researcher & Graphic Designer/Web Developer.